Renewable energy technology is growing fast especially photovoltaic (PV) system to move the conventional electricity generation and distribution towards smart grid. However, similar to monthly electricity bill, the PV energy producers can only monitor their energy PV generation once a month. Any malfuntion in PV system components may reduce the performance of the system without notice. Thus, developing a real-time monitoring system of PV production is very crucial for early detection. In addition, electricity consumption is also important to be monitored more frequently to increase energy savings awareness among consumers. Hardware based Internet-of-Thing (IoT) monitoring and control system is widely used. However, the implementation of

In this paper, a novel flow control strategy which is the inlet throttled pump was used to design an angular velocity control system for rotary actuator. Inlet throttled systems have good performance in addition to their high efficiency compared to traditional valve controlled systems. The flow in the proposed system is adjusted by a valve that is positioned at the pump inlet with the purpose of reducing the energy loses across the valve. This regulated flow is used then to control the actuator angular velocity. The system was modeled and the open loop stability and performance were studied. In order to improve the system performance, Robust-Proportional-Integral-Derivative (RPID) and structured singular value (M@#@) controllers have been d

Flexible joint robot (FJR) manipulators can offer many attractive features over rigid manipulators, including light weight, safe operation, and high power efficiency. However, the tracking control of the FJR is challenging due to its inherent problems, such as underactuation, coupling, nonlinearities, uncertainties, and unknown external disturbances. In this article, a terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) is proposed for the FJR system to guarantee the finite-time convergence of the systems output, and to achieve the total robustness against the lumped disturbance and estimation error. By using two coordinate transformations, the FJR dynamics is turned into a canonical form. A cascaded finite-time sliding mode observer (CFTSMO) is construct

The aim of this research is controlling the amount of the robotic hand catching force using the artificial muscle wire as an actuator to achieve the desired response of the robotic hand in order to catch different things without destroying or dropping them; where the process is to be similar to that of human hand catching way. The proper selection of the amount of the catching force is achieved through out simulation using the fuzzy control technique. The mechanism of the arrangement of the muscle wires is proposed to achieve good force selections. The results indicate the feasibility of using this proposed technique which mimics human reasoning where as the weight of the caught peace increases, the force increases also with approximatel

As one type of resistance furnace, the electrical tube furnace (ETF) typically experiences input noise, measurement noise, system uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances, which significantly degrade its temperature control performance. To provide precise, and robust temperature tracking performance for the ETF, a robust composite control (RCC) method is proposed in this paper. The overall RCC method consists of four elements: First, the mathematical model of the ETF system is deduced, then a state feedback control (SFC) is constructed. Third, a novel disturbance observer (DO) is designed to estimate the lumped disturbance with one observer parameter. Moreover, the stability of the closed loop system including controller

For over a decade, educational technology has been used sparingly in our schools and universities. Online training courses have been used since 2003 to fill the gaps in our learning system and to add extra program besides classroom learning. This paper aims to investigate the Iraqi EFL instructors’ participating in online training courses and its influence on the process of teaching and learning.

       The sample of present study consists of 30 instructors from University of Baghdad. The questionnaire of sixteen items was constructed. After ensuring validity and reliability of questionnaire, it was applied on March 2013 and the result shows that most of instructors improve their teaching methods b

Wastewater treatment plants operators prefer to make adjustments because they are more cost effective, to use the existing tank instead of building new ones. In this case an imported materials would be  used as bio-loads to increase biomass and thus maintain efficiency as the next organic loading increases.In the present study, a local substance "pumice stone" was used as a biological carrier in the aeration tank, and the experiments were carried out in five stages: without biological carriers, filling ratio of 4%,10%,20%, and25% with pumice stone, the maximum organic loading at each stage (1.1884, 1.2144, 1.9432, 2.7768, 3.3141)g BOD /l.d respectively.Other experiments were carried out to determine the best filling ratio, the SS remova